Two young men in civilian clothes were leaving the embassy when I was, and I asked them, “Hey, do you guys by any chance have wheels?”
One said distractedly, “Yeah. Do you need a lift?”
I figured that if I couldn’t go back to Papasan’s, and I couldn’t go to the Caravelle—where the Aussie guards probably had the steel door shut like a bear trap—I might as well go to the old colonial Continental Palace Hotel. I’d seen it open and guarded on my way to the embassy. Plus, it was like a fortress and near Notre Dame Basilica, in case I felt inspired to say my prayers.
“Well, if you’re going by the Palace, I could use a ride.”
“That’s exactly where we’re going,” he said. “Jump in.”
I hopped in the back. Then the guy behind the wheel said to his mate, “Get us more sidearms.”
So, he went back into the consulate and, after a few minutes, reappeared holding three .45 handguns, belts, and ammo clips. He handed one to the driver and one to me. I took it—there was no time to explain myself, and they didn’t ask. I figured they must be CIA. We weren’t about to engage in small talk. We all put on our belts, and the driver took off as fast as hell.
He floored it all the way down the main drag, right past the old Renault—the bodies were still there. I looked up and saw a few people peeking from windows and doorways as we raced by.
He sped right past Tu Do Street, missing the turn for the hotel. When he flew around the next corner, I said, “Um, weren’t you guys going to the Palace?”
He replied, “We are.” And with that, he made another turn, and there was the palace that he meant: not the hotel but the Presidential Palace, South Vietnam’s White House. All of a sudden, boom! A rocket hit the jeep speeding ahead of us, the only other vehicle in sight. The jeep launched into the air, with people flying out of it in every direction.
In a second, my two guys jumped out of our jeep—one to the left and one to the right—and tore off running. The jeep kept rolling forward, and I bailed out with my head down. I ran behind another one of those giant palms. There was gunfire, but a soldier in an ROK uniform and as big as John Wayne ran right through it to the first jeep. He grabbed one of the wounded men from the ground, picked him up, and ran, carrying him down the block and through a door in a wall. I learned later it was the residence of the Korean ambassador. The guard left the other bodies in the street. They weren’t moving.
I looked up behind me to see where the gunfire was coming from. The Vietcong had manned a concrete-and-rebar framework of a building under construction, about five stories tall. Armed with machine guns and bazookas, they were launching rockets at the Presidential Palace guards, who were returning fire. It came out later that the VC were thirteen sappers, including a woman, who had been driven from the palace and had holed up in there. I noticed an indentation in the cement wall behind me, and I ran to it and wedged myself inside.
I could see that about thirty yards up, a young MP was lying on the sidewalk. He was a big kid who still had his baby fat on him. I wanted to check on him, but I was afraid the palace guards would mistake me for the enemy and send some unfriendly fire my way. But I couldn’t let him lie there.
I got down and was inching low along the wall when suddenly I heard a voice that nearly scared me out of my shoes. “Get back!” a man hissed in a hoarse whisper. “Forget it. He’s dead. I checked him.”
I looked, and it was another guy I hadn’t even seen lying in the street, wounded. He was dressed in plain clothes but had a .45. He said in a low voice, “I’m okay; stay back.”
I jumped back into the crook in the wall. From there, I could look inside the palace gate and see the white-shirted South Vietnamese National Police and regular South Vietnamese army (ARVN) soldiers on the grounds. They were in the middle of a big argument with some US Army officers.
Then the ground began to tremble, and three US tanks started rolling down the street. The ARVN and the US Army officers ran out to meet them. Then they started yelling at each other again while the American soldiers ran under fire to tend to the wounded guy in civvies, slumped on the street.
They didn’t see me, but I was about twenty feet away. The gist of it, from what I could hear, was that the American officers wanted to blow down the wall I was standing in front of and go after the VC. But the ARVN and the South Vietnamese cops wanted the Americans to get the hell out of there. They had been handed responsibility for the security of Saigon only a month before. They had this, they said in English; they could protect their President Thieu without US help. My thought bubble was, They’re doing a helluva job so far!
An exasperated US Army lieutenant shouted at the South Vietnamese officers, “You don’t need our help, huh?! Fine with me; we’ll go help someone who does!”
He signaled to the tank drivers to continue down the block, and they headed out. They were followed by jeeps full of the wounded, including the guy who’d warned me to stay back. The dead were left where they had fallen. I found out later that they took the wounded to the Seventeenth Field Hospital, itself under attack by the Vietcong.
I thought that maybe I should try to go with them. But then I said to myself, Nah, they’re slightly busy right now, and they don’t give a damn about me, nor should they. They were looking for Charlie; I was trying to run away from Charlie.
Then a bunch of the South Vietnamese cops came out with M16s. They had no idea I was wedged in the wall. An American was with them—I guess he was an adviser, as he was wearing some kind of American police insignia. US police, sheriffs, and troopers had all served in Vietnam as advisers since the 1950s to train the South Vietnamese police. President Kennedy stepped up the American adviser program after paramilitary forces, led by Ngo Dinh Nhu, the younger brother of then president Ngo Dinh Diem, shot and killed eight children and a woman at a march protesting the Catholic regime’s treatment of the Buddhist majority in June 1963. Then a Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, self-immolated in a Saigon intersection in protest, and Ngo Dinh Nhu’s haughty wife, Madame Nhu, contemptuously called it “a barbecue.” Ngo Dinh Nhu’s men then stole the holy man’s charred heart from the altar of a Buddhist temple. Ngo Dinh Nhu and his brother, President Diem, were assassinated the following November, three weeks before President Kennedy.
The American cop in front of me was yelling at the White Shirts in a north-midwestern accent—maybe from Minnesota or Wisconsin. His interpreter explained that he wanted a ladder to be put up against a ledge of the building. The American hollered, “Let’s get the hell in there and take them out!”
Now, I don’t speak Vietnamese, but I didn’t need a translator to tell me that these guys didn’t like that idea very much. They bristled with fear. White Mice, indeed.
“Come on! What the hell is wrong with you? We’ve got to clear the building!”
They didn’t move.
“We’ll put up some smoke, and we’ll scramble up there while the rest of you provide cover. Let’s go, goddamn it!”
The interpreter yelled his translation, probably with the expletives included, but the White Mice just stood there, shaking their heads.
Finally, the American cop yelled, “Goddamn it, get me a f—ing ladder, and I’ll do it!”
The South Vietnamese policemen liked the sound of that better. They scampered into the palace grounds and ran back with an extension ladder. The VC were trying to pick them off all along the way. The South Vietnamese cops threw smoke bombs up, and the place erupted with gunfire, but the American cop raced up the ladder and over the wall.
Within a second or so, boom! He came flying out backward and hit the ground. The man was out cold, but, thankfully, he must have been alive, because the Vietnamese picked him up and ran yelling down the street. They threw him into the back of a pickup truck, jumped in with him, and sped off under fire.
After that, nobody else came out from the palace grounds into the street. I stayed in that crook in the wall for what seemed an eternity as the firefight between the palace guards and the guerrillas in the construction site continued. It was to last fifteen hours. The South Vietnamese president, Nguyen van Thieu, wasn’t even inside the palace: he was safely at his mother-in-law’s house for New Year’s down in My Thoi in the Mekong Delta, an hour and a half away. Man, had he missed all the clues. Or maybe he hadn’t.